A LOAF OF BREAD AND A COKE.

I had a flashback of nursing school clinicals... Flashbacks like this can be scary, and I am sooo glad that it is over. I did have some memorable moments though. Like a summer of critical care and psych in 10 weeks. I think they were actually trying to kill us, no joke. At one point we endured clinical every day for 2 weeks.

On our Critical Care rotation 8 nursing students were assigned to various areas of the hospital and our instructor floated around all day checking on us. There was this gal in my class who was sort of an "outsider". She was very strange and acted uncomfortable around everyone. I felt bad for her the whole time but a lot of her problems were self inflicted.

I started my ER rotation, scared to death. I don't know if I was more nervous about the clinicals or that this was the ER I had quit working at by calling in the last two days with explosive diarrhea. Hey, no one is going to force you to show up for work when you tell them you have explosive diarrhea! Half of my fear came from knowing that I could be asked to perform a random task at any moment, the other half of my fear was that the manager I had quit on was going to recognize me. I spent the day ducking behind corners, avoiding eye contact and praying nothing bad would happen.

Most of the fear was really about the dreaded IV STICK (which I sucked at). But the Mother who raised me was an ER nurse. And the first thing she did when she found out I was going to face this challenge was let me practice on her. You know your mom loves you when she lets you start your first IV on her. She was lucky I had worked out all my childhood aggression years prior. My first attempts failed and my mom returned to work the next day with a hematoma and a funny story.

The clinical instructors were always watching over our shoulders. Checking us off on our skills list and passing out "ED's" which stood for " experiencing difficulty" when we made mistakes. That day in the ER I was relieved that my teacher was floating because chances were she would not be around to critique me starting IV's, hanging fluids, and dropping NG tubes. But, as my luck has it, just as I was about to start an IV she came walking around the corner.

She followed me into my patient's room, explaining that she was going to watch and I was a student and blah blah blah. I was sure my patient was freaking out hearing about my inexperience. I prayed to God that he would miraculously anoint my hands and this poor woman would live through this with as little trauma as possible. IT WORKED! Somehow I did it , I don't know how, but it worked! I think I was as shocked as my teacher to see it! Glad that it was over, I went on with my day.

I had it easy compared to my strange classmate. This gal ran with some bad luck!
I watched her preceptor ask her if she wants to start an IV and walk with her into a room. A short while later I watched the student walk out into the middle of the ER nurses station, look at me, get woozy and pass out. BAM down she goes right there in the middle of the floor. I couldn't help but laugh to myself. I felt so bad for her, everyone standing around staring. It must have been the worst feeling.

The next week I was sitting at the nurses station and heard a woman screaming "Shit! ahhhh, Damn it!" I ran down the hall and found the strange gals preceptor on the floor holding her Achilles Tendon and she was behind her with a patient in a wheelchair. Those poor preceptors had no idea what they were getting into. I'm sure this preceptor thought all was safe. Then she was assigned the student from hell who wheeled a pt. around a corner and took her out from behind. Oh it was bad!.

She just had no common sense. Another day we found her sitting in the middle of the hallway on a bedside commode drinking coffee. She drank so much coffee she would shake all morning. It was not unusual for her to carry around a 64 oz giant mug. She once told me it held a whole pot of coffee. She smoked like a chimney too. Her graduation cap must have been in her car all semester because at graduation it was yellow, seriously. Her whole outfit was white and she had this yellow hat. She was crazy!. She would never relax and she was always, disappearing and doing bizarre things. Like turning the heat up to 90 degrees in our little conference room so our teacher would become so uncomfortable she'd let us go early. Or the day she just left clinical.
I guess she decided she was done, left and went home. It goes on. There was the day we all sat down to eat lunch and she had bought an entire loaf of bread from the cafeteria . That was what she was eating, a coke and a loaf of bread. It made for an interesting 2 years. - THE ROOKIE